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enCopyright 20152015-07-31T15:19:17+00:00When Scientists Actually Change Their MindsMon, 09 Aug 2010 08:03:00 EDTinfo@csicop.org ()http://www.csicop.org/si/show/when_scientists_actually_change_their_minds
http://www.csicop.org/si/show/when_scientists_actually_change_their_mindsAs a graduate
student in 1980, I was interested in impact cratering. I had just finished
reading the comet catastrophe novel Lucifer's
Hammer when Luis Alvarez,
the famous physicist from Lawrence Berkeley, came to Caltech to present
a colloquium on his group's asteroid hypothesis. It made so much sense.
What else but an impact could possibly cause a global climate catastrophe
and mass extinction?

Many
years later, I read an article that featured Wallace Broecker, the Columbia
University scientist with revolutionary ideas about catastrophic climate
change caused by abrupt slowdowns in ocean circulation. I was fascinated
by his idea that the rapid onset of the Younger Dryas cold spell could
have been caused by the collapse of an ice dam and a deluge of freshwater
into the North Atlantic that shut off the Gulf Stream, stopping the
flow of tropical heat to the northern continents and plunging them into
ice-age conditions. He showed that there could be other causes of global
catastrophes that don't involve impacts.

I
was delighted when Broecker agreed to give the opening presentation
at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) session I helped organize, but
I was surprised to learn that he had abandoned his famous hypothesis
about the cause of the Younger Dryas. He started his presentation by
reminding everyone that he used to argue that it was triggered by the
flood from the ice-age Lake Agassiz, but when he flew over the route
the floodwaters should have followed, he saw no geomorphic evidence
for a flood. He had changed his mind!

His
primary objections to the impact hypothesis were the same as his objections
to the flood he had previously championed as the explanation: lack of
evidence and lack of uniqueness of the Younger Dryas. Abrupt changes
in climate, both warming and cooling, have happened many times, and
Broecker argues that the climate system is inherently unstable. Why
should only one of a long sequence of changes have such an improbable
and catastrophic trigger event—whether impact or flood—when the
climate system has repeatedly undergone such changes all by itself?

In
his 1987 CSICOP address, Carl Sagan said, "In science it often happens
that scientists say, ‘You know that's a really good argument; my
position is mistaken,' and then they actually change their
minds and you never hear that old view from them again... . I cannot
recall the last time something like that has happened in politics or
religion."

Broecker's
esteem among scientists was not diminished when he changed his mind.
The Younger Dryas impact proponents would do well to follow his example.

Mark
Boslough was co-organizer of the AGU Younger Dryas session in December.
He is a physicist at Sandia National Laboratories and an adjunct professor
at the University of New Mexico.

An Evolutionary
Algorithm Beats Intelligent Design

How
an intelligent design theorist was bested in a public math competition by a genetic algorithm—a computer simulation of evolution.

In the summer of 2006,
a different kind of war was waged on the Internet—a war between computer programs
written by both evolutionary scientists and by intelligent design (ID)
advocates. The war came to a climax in a public math competition in
which dozens of humans stepped forward to compete against each other
and against genetic ("evolutionary") computer algorithms. The results
were stunning: The official representative of the intelligent design
community was outperformed by an evolutionary algorithm, thus learning
Orgel's Second Law—"Evolution is smarter than you are"—the
hard way. In addition, the same IDer's attempt to make a genetic algorithm
that achieved a specific target without "specification" of that
target was publicly exposed as

a rudimentary sham.
And finally, two pillars of ID theory, "irreducible complexity"
and "complex specified information" were shown not to be beyond
the capabilities of evolution, contrary to official ID dogma.

Genetic Algorithms

"Genetic algorithms"
(GAs) are computerized simulations of evolution. They are used to study
evolutionary processes and solve difficult (and sometimes intractable)
design or analysis problems. Several novel designs generated with genetic
algorithms have been patented (Brainz.org 2008). Evolutionary algorithms
are currently used in a variety of industries to get effective answers
to very difficult problems, including problems whose brute-force solutions
would require centuries, even on superfast computers. In contrast,
GAs can often produce highly useful results for the same problems in
just a few minutes.

The basic
idea for a genetic algorithm is simple. You start with a randomly generated
"herd" of possible solutions to a given difficult problem,
where the general structure of any conceivable solution can be represented
with a chunk of memory in a computer program. Treat the members of this
herd as "organisms," and test every herd member's performance
with a fitness function. While the fitness function can be
written in terms of proximity to a distant known "target," it is
more often just a straightforward calculation of some parameter of interest,
such as the length or cost of some component or feature, or perhaps
the gain of a wire antenna. Any candidate organism can have its fitness
readily measured, and the performances of any number of candidates can
be impartially compared. The fitness test is commonly used to help decide
which organisms get to be "parents" for the next generation of organisms.
Throwing in some mutations, and letting higher-fitness organisms breed
for a few hundred generations, often leads to surprising (and sometimes
even astonishing) results.

Creationists
and intelligent design proponents vigorously deny the fact that genetic
algorithms demonstrate how the evolution of novel and complex "designs"
can happen. They claim that GAs cannot generate true novelty and that
all such "answers" are surreptitiously introduced into the
program via the algorithm's fitness testing functions. The support
for this claim stems mainly from a few pages of a book Richard Dawkins
wrote nearly twenty-five years ago.

Dawkins and the Weasel

Creationists have
been fixated for decades on Richard Dawkins's "Weasel"
simulation from his 1986 book The
Blind Watchmaker (Dawkins 1986).
Unlike real genetic algorithms developed for industry or research, Dawkins's
Weasel algorithm included a very precise description of the intended
target. However, this precise specification was used only for a tutorial demonstration of the power
of cumulative selection rather
than for generation of true novelty. In the Dawkins example, the known
target is the phrase from Hamlet, "Methinks it is like a weasel."
The organisms are initially random strings of twenty-eight characters
each. Every generation is tested, and the string that is closest to
the target Weasel phrase is selected to seed the subsequent generation.
The exact Shakespearean quote is obtained in just a few dozen generations.
Despite Dawkins's explicit disclaimer that, in real life, evolution
has no long-distance target, creationists of all varieties have latched
on to "Weasel" as a convenient straw version of evolution that is
easy to poke holes in.

The main
ID theorist dealing with genetic algorithms is William Dembski, who
stated the ID/creationist position as of September 2005 with these words:

And nevertheless,
it remains the case that no
genetic algorithm or evolutionary computation has designed a complex,
multipart, functionally integrated, irreducibly complex system without
stacking the deck by incorporating the very solution that was supposed
to be attained from scratch (Dawkins
1986 and Schneider 2000 are among the worst offenders here). (Dembski
2005)

Stephen
Meyer is a top gun in the Discovery Institute's Center for Science
and Culture, the Seattle-based center of ID pontification and promotion.
In Meyer's "peer-reviewed" ID paper, "The Origin of
Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories," he states:

Genetic algorithms
... only succeed by the illicit expedient of providing the computer
with a target sequence and then treating relatively greater proximity
to future function (i.e., the target sequence), not actual present function,
as a selection criterion. (Meyer 2004)

Both
Dembski and Meyer cite Weasel in these statements and go on to claim
that all GAs
are similarly targeted. And that is the gist of the formal ID response
to genetic algorithms: paint them all with the Weasel brush, and pretend
they all need predefined targets to work.

Steiner's Problem

In 2001, as I was
preparing a response to an upcoming talk by ID's Phillip Johnson at
the University of New Mexico, I decided to address the Weasel problem.
I set out to develop a genetic algorithm of my own for solving difficult
math problems, without using any specified target. I wanted something visual
yet simple—a sort of miniature digital playground on the very edge
of complexity. I ended up choosing "Steiner's Problem": given
a two-dimensional set of points, find the most compact network of straight-line
segments that connects the points (Courant and Hilbert 1941).

In Steiner's
problem, there can be variable "Steiner points" in addition
to the fixed points that are to be connected. If there are four fixed
points arranged in a rectangle, the Steiner solution consists of five
segments connected in a bowtie shape; each of the points on the rectangle's
corners connects to one of two Steiner points in the interior of the
rectangle, and a fifth segment connects the two Steiner points (figure
1).

A Genetic Algorithm for Steiner's
Problem

In my Steiner genetic
algorithm, the organisms are represented by strings of letters and numbers—a
kind of primitive "DNA." Two such DNA strands are shown in
figure 2. The strands, when read by the transcription routine, supply
three types of information about the network represented by each organism:
the number of Steiner points, the numerical locations of these points,
and a true/false connection map that dictates which points are to be
connected by segments.

Steiner
points can be placed anywhere in the region encompassing the fixed points;
for these simulations, the region is a square with 999 units on a side.
Length is measured in these units; for example, the length of the horizontal
segment joining points (550,600) and (650,600) is 100 units.

Some
representative networks for a six-point Steiner problem appear in figure
3. These are the "phenotypes" that correspond to the transcription
of DNA (or the "genotype"). The fitness function used tests for
two things: Are the fixed points all connected? What is the total length
of all "expressed" segments? It's critical to emphasize that the
fitness function need not have any descriptions of the actual Steiner
solution for any given set of points. Fitness, here, is not based on
any specific future function but only on present function. For example,
the two organisms of figure 3 are clearly not the optimum Steiner solution for six fixed
points (solid circles) in a rectangle. Yet, they can both easily be
evaluated for current
function. Here, the organism
on the right is considerably shorter than the one on the left, and thus
it has a better chance of having its "seed" continue on to the next
generation. If an organism fails to connect all the given points, it
is given a large "death" length of 100,000 units, making it extremely
"unfit."

The Cyber Battles Begin

I posted a detailed
discussion of this work on the Panda's Thumb blog
on July 5, 2006. The point of that report was to demonstrate that genetic
algorithms can solve difficult problems without knowing anything about
the answer(s) in advance. I demonstrated that, while occasionally producing
the correct (Steiner) solution, most of the time the algorithm converged
on imperfect solutions. I called these "MacGyver"
solutions, after the television hero who often found clever ways to
get out of tough fixes. While the MacGyver solutions are clearly not
the optimum Steiner shape, they get the job done efficiently and are
often within one percent
of the length of the formal Steiner
solution itself. The GA operates by seeding the next generation with
those organisms that are shorter in length in the current generation.
This GA does not, as Meyer falsely claims, select for future function (a
precise target) rather than for present
function (here, the lengths of
the digital creatures).

The ID
community responded to my article by simply reiterating their claim
that the solutions were secretly introduced via the fitness function.
IDers are desperate to make Dawkins's Weasel the poster boy for all
GAs, and they continue to paint all GAs as similarly "target-driven"
or "front-loaded." Some ID theorists have tried to skirt the obvious
lack of specific target description in the Steiner genetic algorithm
by claiming that its virtual environment—the condition "shorter
is better"—is really a description of the "precise target" itself.
They say, "After all, you wanted shorter networks, and the Steiner
solution is defined as the shortest network, so you are selecting for
a specific target!"

This
ID argument fails because the specific details of complex solutions
are not explicitly
imbedded in the overall design goals. To use an analogy, simply stating
the objective "Build a vehicle that can carry men to the Moon and
back" does not result in the spontaneous appearance of the complete
plans for an Apollo spacecraft (with separate command, service, and
lunar modules), along with a Saturn V launch vehicle.

The Collapse of the Pillars
of ID Theory

One reason I chose
Steiner's problem was that Steiner solutions possess "irreducible
complexity" (IC) and also exhibit "complex specified information"
(CSI), two features that intelligent design theorists claim are impossible
via evolutionary processes. I contend that the results of the GA—both
Steiners and MacGyvers—exhibit IC: if any segment is removed or rerouted,
basic function of the system (here, connecting the fixed points) is
lost completely. In addition, the Steiner solutions themselves are CSI,
by virtue of their being complex (in the sense that the correct answer
is rare enough to be improbable) and by virtue of their nature as specified
information (as the formal solution to a given math problem).

ID proponents
responded by claiming that the Steiner solutions discussed were "not
really IC," even though these solutions obviously represent "a
single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that
contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of
the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning," the
very definition of IC from Michael Behe's book Darwin's
Black Box (Behe 1996). Behe goes
on to claim that IC structures are impossible in gradual evolution (improvement
by slight, successive modifications to precursor systems) "because
any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part
is by definition nonfunctional."

The general
ID response to my article was that the Steiner solutions could not be
IC because they were derived from ancestors that were longer but still functional. So,
the very existence of functional precursors is now being used to redefine
irreducible complexity. IC apparently no longer has anything to do with
the existence of critical, precisely interlocking components. This is
classic goal-post movement. The concept of IC has become a useless tautology:
if it's IC, it can't have evolved, and if it evolved, it can't
be IC. Of course, Behe was thinking only about bottom-up evolution
initially. In the Steiner GA, however, populations of organisms often
become less complex through shedding of redundant
complexity. This type of pathway
to IC structures has been observed numerous times in nature.

The ID Version of a Genetic
Algorithm

Bill Dembski's
coauthor of his Uncommon Descent blog, software engineer Salvador Cordova,
was the most prominent member of the ID community to weigh in on the
series of GA articles. Cordova repeatedly misrepresented GAs as necessarily
"front-loaded" and dismissed the results as "computational
theatrics." On August 15, 2006, Cordova posted his code for a genetic algorithm, which he contended
could solve for the sum of the first 1,000 integers without
specifying the answer. He said
this program was based on the same "theatrics" I was employing in
my Steiner GA. However, I proved that his program was, despite copious
amounts of smoke and mirrors, simply a direct method of specifying the
answer, or target. Instead of matching the string "Methinks it is
like a weasel," Cordova engineered his GA to converge on the specific
target sequence 251, 252, 253, ...
750. Cordova then added these 500 numbers and doubled that sum, inevitably
arriving at the sum of the integers from 1 to 1,000, or 500,500. It
was easy to prove that his badly written and confusing program was a
direct encoding of a fixed target, leading directly to the summation
of the first N integers.

The Design Challenge

On August 14, 2006,
I posted a public "Design Challenge" on the Panda's Thumb
blog in which readers were given one week to submit answers for the
tricky six-point Steiner system shown in figure 4. It was an open-book
test. Since the ID person responding to this discussion, Salvador Cordova,
had been claiming that the answer was "front-loaded" into the fitness
test, I challenged him to follow that lead to the answer.

I had
come up with the six-point problem two days earlier, while trying to
design a system that would have the "double bowtie" as its
Steiner solution (figure 5). Upon reviewing an overnight batch of three-hundred
runs, however, I was surprised to see solutions with lengths much shorter
than the double bowtie's 1,839 units. And when I checked out the GA's
best solution, the odd design shown in figure 6, it was like finding
a diamond in the rough. I realized the GA had found the correct Steiner
solution, and it wasn't what I had been expecting at all. Instead
of the double bowtie, the actual Steiner solution twists both bowties
a bit, and they become conjoined in a three-segment "dogleg" along
the center vertical. There are two possible Steiners, one with the bowties
skewed up and the other with them skewed down. The GA found both solutions,
along with hundreds of compact MacGyvers.

Dozens
of Panda's Thumb readers responded to the Design Challenge. Most were
pro-science enthusiasts, but ID theorist Cordova submitted several candidate
answers as well. Cordova had repeatedly compared the Steiner GA's
fitness function to a T-shirt with a large bull's-eye emblazoned on
it and the Steiner solution itself to the person inside that shirt.
He analogized shooting a paintball gun at the bull's-eye symbol and
then telling the victim, "Don't be mad, I wasn't aiming at you,
I was aiming at the shirt you were wearing." Curiously, Cordova did
not reverse-engineer my publicly posted GA (the shirt) to deduce the
solution (e.g., the person wearing the shirt). Instead, he went the
traditional route and tried to design an answer using Fermat points
and trigonometry. Interestingly, Cordova failed to deduce the basic
network shape for the six-point solution, finding instead the slightly
longer MacGyver solution of figure 7. Fifteen other "intelligent designers"
(humans, in other words) were able to derive the correct answer—the true Steiner solution. However,
all of these humans were pro-science skeptics of intelligent design
creationism. Correct solutions were also found by not one but two independent
genetic algorithms! An additional fifteen designers derived various
MacGyver solutions, thus proving these, too, are complex specified information.

And that's
how ID theorist Cordova learned the true meaning of what Daniel Dennett
terms Leslie Orgel's Second Law: "Evolution is smarter than you
are."

After
being bested by an evolutionary algorithm, Cordova changed his tune
and moved the goalposts over to computer speed. He said there was no
shame in being beaten by the computer because computers are designed
to do lots of math very, very fast and are thus superior to humans in
that regard. But that argument doesn't wash either. The computer can
check out lots of random solutions very quickly (about 8,000 per second),
but simply guessing randomly at the answer is a terrible way to solve
the problem. After dozens of hours, random guessing couldn't come
close to matching even one of the efficient designs the genetic algorithm
was pumping out every ninety seconds (figure 8).

Conclusion

The 2006 "War of
the Weasels" was, to say the least, not kind to the ID movement.
The central dogma of ID regarding genetic algorithms—the Weasel offense—was
definitively and publicly shot down. ID theory's two main "evolution
stoppers"—irreducible complexity and complex specified information—were
shown to be child's play for an evolution-based program that evaluates
current function only and is mindless of any specific future optimum.
Finally, an ID "theorist" was bested by a program that used evolution
to derive solutions. Check out the complete archives of the War of the
Weasels on the Panda's Thumb blog, in the "Evo
Math" category. l

The rise and
fall of the theory that cosmic catastrophes altered human prehistory
in North America.

Ever since
the Alvarez (1980) hypothesis that the end-Cretaceous (Cretaceous-Tertiary
or KT) mass extinction was the result of a cosmic impact sixty-five
million years ago, the idea of killer asteroids or comets has been frequently
discussed. The stunning confirmation of the KT impact initiated a revolution
in our thinking about possible external events and their effects on
biological evolution. David Raup of the University of Chicago famously
proposed that perhaps all major mass extinctions were impact induced.
He even published a "kill curve," suggesting that lesser extinctions
might be the result of smaller impacts. Unfortunately for those of us
who sought a general explanation for mass extinctions, these broader
suggestions have not been verified. It seems increasingly likely that
cosmic impacts are only one of several catastrophic events that have
produced mass extinctions. Still, the discovery that an impact sixty-five
million years ago led to the extinction of the dinosaurs remains one
of the iconic ideas of late twentieth century science.

The
most dramatic recent hypothesis linking extinctions with impacts was
proposed in 2007 by a team of twenty-six scientists, led by nuclear
chemist Richard Firestone of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory,
with independent geophysicist Allen West; geologist James Kennett of
the University of California, Santa Barbara (a member of the National
Academy of Sciences); and archaeologists Douglas Kennett and Jon Erlandson
of the University of Oregon. In a widely reported presentation at
a joint assembly of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in Acapulco,
Mexico—followed a few months later by a paper in the Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)—these
scientists proposed a cosmic origin for a geologically recent event,
the extinction of many large mammals (megafauna) in North America approximately
13,000 years ago. The events they linked were the presence of a dark
soil layer that coincided with the extinction of megafauna (including
the mammoth and mastodon), the end of the Clovis culture (identified
by its large and well-made spear points), and the start of the Younger
Dryas (YD) cool period (a millennium pause in the general warming at
the end of the last ice age). The in
situ bones of extinct
megafauna, along with Clovis stone tools, occur below this black mat
but not within or above it. At this boundary the team reported finding
enriched levels of iridium and other signatures of extraterrestrial
material.

In
a sweeping conclusion reminiscent of the Alvarez hypothesis, Firestone
and his colleagues postulated that these events were tied to one or
more cosmic impacts over North America, releasing energy they estimated
at about ten million megatons (equivalent to an impacting comet four
kilometers in diameter). They suggested that an airburst and/or surface
impact by a dense swarm of carbonaceous asteroids or comets set vast
areas of the North American continent on fire. This swarm would have
exploded above or even into the Laurentide Ice Sheet north of the
Great Lakes. Such an airburst would have been a million times larger
than the Tunguska impact event of 1908.

Scientific Reactions

While archaeologists
pondered the reality of this sharp boundary layer and the new evidence
of extraterrestrial materials, a few astronomers and impact experts
immediately questioned this scenario. They noted that there was no mechanism
to hold such a dense swarm of impactors together in space. To the suggestion
that a large comet had broken up just before hitting Earth, they replied
that this lacked a physical mechanism. If the comet had shattered when
it encountered the atmosphere at an altitude of about one hundred kilometers,
the lateral dispersion would be at most tens of kilometers, hardly enough
to distribute the effects across North America. An alternate suggestion
was that this event was analogous to the 1992 tidal break-up of comet
Shoemaker-Levy 9, which resulted in the separate impact of about twenty-three
fragments on Jupiter two years later. However, these comet fragments
were spread over more than a million kilometers in space, and the impacts
were distributed over all longitudes on Jupiter. While it is true that
some comets have been seen to spontaneously disintegrate in space, the
chances of this happening just before an impact with Earth is negligible—something
that might have happened at most once in the past four billion years.
There was apparently no way to get a swarm of impactors to target North
America alone.

One
of Firestone and his colleagues' suggestions that troubled geologists
and impact experts was that the same event (or a similar one) might
have been responsible for the Carolina Bays geologic formation. The
Carolina Bays are several hundred thousand shallow, elliptical depressions
of disputed origin along the U.S. eastern seaboard. Firestone suggested
that each of these more than 100,000 features was the result of a cosmic
impact. Since the well-known Tunguska airburst in Siberia in 1908 did
not form a crater, the implication is that these were made by larger
objects that reached the ground. But calculation of average impact frequency
suggested that only about one super-Tunguska could be expected to hit
Earth in the past 13,000 years. The chances of two such extremely unlikely
swarm impacts happening within the past few thousand years is worse
than negligible.

A
warning of the problems with this hypothesis should have been apparent
to anyone who read 2006's The
Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes: Flood, Fire, and Famine in the History
of Civilization by Richard
Firestone and Allen West, with writer and publicist Simon Warwick-Smith.
This trade book, which appeared a year before Firestone's AGU presentation,
described the YD impact hypothesis as part of a much larger cycle of
cosmic events. This book develops Firestone's 2001 suggestion that
a cosmic ray catastrophe, probably caused by a supernova, occurred in
northeastern North America in the late Pleistocene. He concluded that
massive thermal neutron irradiation radically altered the radioactivity
of terrestrial materials and "probably figured in the mass extinction
of Ice Age fauna." In The
Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes,
Firestone links the YD impact to this postulated nearby supernova,
which he asserted took place 41,000 years ago and initially devastated
most life in Asia. Then 34,000 years ago the shock wave from this supernova
initiated another wave of intense cosmic bombardment of Earth. The only
evidence for this event is the remarkable claim that mastodon tusks
from about that time are pitted with cosmic dust, suggesting that these
animals received the direct blast of supernova material striking Earth
(unstopped, apparently, by our atmosphere).

In The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes, the debris cloud from the supernova
is supposed to have reached Earth about 13,000 years ago. The YD impact
was one manifestation of this blast wave, bathing the planet in radioactivity
and destabilizing the magnetic field. In this book the authors suggest
that the Carolina Bays were created by secondary impacts of ejecta from
the main hit in the North American ice sheet. To produce this much ejecta,
the hit must have been among the most catastrophic events in Earth's
history. They suggested that the YD impact excavated Hudson Bay, making
it larger than the KT impact of sixty-five million years ago, which
is estimated to be a once-in-one-hundred-million-years event. Yet supposedly
this huge hit did not produce a worldwide mass extinction but influenced
only the megafauna of North America. This entire scenario is inconsistent
with what astronomers know about supernovas, which Phil Plait summarized
in his recent book Death
from the Skies. It raises
serious questions about the reliability of the PNAS paper that Firestone and West,
with two dozen additional authors, published a year later.

New Data and Continued Controversy

In January
2009, Doug Kennett published a paper in Science asserting that nanodiamonds provide
the strongest evidence for the impact hypothesis, with multiple airbursts
and impacts at the onset of the YD cooling. He argued that these nanodiamonds
were produced in the moderate shocks associated with comet airbursts.
By this time, earlier claims about iridium enrichment and other possible
impact markers had been withdrawn. The usual geological evidence of
large crater-forming impacts such as the KT, namely shocked quartz,
had never been reported at the YD boundary sites. Now the nature and
origin of nanodiamonds became the primary issue.

There
were a variety of claims and counterclaims concerning the nanodiamonds.
Were they produced in the impact, or were they primordial material
trapped in the comet when it formed billions of years earlier? Most
impact experts agree that nanodiamonds were unlikely to have been formed
in the impact. In fact, Mark Boslough of Sandia National Laboratories
calculated that the high temperatures and pressures in a large impact
would likely destroy existing nanodiamonds. Some note that nanodiamonds
are actually ubiquitous on Earth and can even be formed in fires. One
scientist joked that perhaps the nanodiamonds were concentrated at
human habitation sites where hunters were roasting the meat from mammoths
and mastodons. The history of these claims and counterclaims is well
documented in articles by Science journalist Richard Kerr published
in 2007, 2008, and 2009.

At
a meeting of the Geological Society of America (GSA) in October 2009,
several presentations argued strongly against the YD impact from a variety of perspectives (see GSA summary in references). One paper claimed that
the black mats at the YD boundary were not charcoal from widespread
fires but rather peat-rich dark soils formed during a wet period. Another
speaker noted that there was no archeological evidence for a sudden
decline in the human population of North America at the YD. While one
speaks of the end of the Clovis culture, this only means that the style
of stone tools changed. We don't know why, although one possibility
is a shift to hunting smaller animals. Other scientific teams reported
that their efforts in the field to find nanodiamonds or other impact
markers at the YD boundary layer were unsuccessful.

Some
impact proponents who were not present at the GSA meeting wrote blogs
and circulated e-mails accusing these scientists of sloppy fieldwork.
They asserted that the boundary layer was very thin and rather spotty
in distribution, requiring care to find it—care they implied had not
been exercised by their critics. The GSA session resulted in the undercutting
of the credibility of the original PNAS and Science papers, but since the two sides
did not confront each other directly, nothing was settled.

The American Geophysical Union
Symposium

Given the
conflicting interpretations concerning a possible YD impact catastrophe,
many scientists thought a debate between proponents and critics might
help clear the air. The YD impact hypothesis had been discussed for
more than two years without any common ground emerging. Indeed, the
original team of twenty-six scientists was itself fragmenting, with
only Richard Firestone and Allen West still strongly advocating the
original multi-comet impact scenario. Mark Boslough of Sandia worked
with Allen West to organize a symposium at the 2009 fall meeting of
the AGU, with speakers from both sides. While no one expected that public
discussion would lead to reconciliation, the organizers hoped this symposium
would at least focus on the main issues.

The
December 2009 AGU session topic was "Younger Dryas Boundary: Extraterrestrial
Impact or Not?" Ten speakers were squeezed into a single two-hour
session, including Allen West, impact specialist Peter Schultz of Brown
University, and former NASA geoscientist Ted Bunch from among the original PNAS
authors. Firestone chose not to attend. There was standing room only
at the session, and several hundred others were turned away at the door.

The
star of the event was Wally Broecker of the Department of Earth and
Environmental Sciences at Columbia University. Broecker is one of
the most respected environmental scientists in the world. Credited with
first describing the ocean current conveyer belt and inventing the term
"global warming," his honors include membership in the National
Academy of Sciences and award of the Presidential Medal of Science.
His presentation was sober and low key, but he made it clear that he
was unconvinced by the evidence for an impact or any catastrophic change
at the YD boundary. But rather than condemning the hypothesis, he stated
simply that the decline in the North American megafauna could be understood
as a result of climate change and overhunting—the conventional explanation.
Broecker said, "We do not need the impact hypothesis."

Most
of the speakers who followed Broecker restated positions that were already
on the record. West and his colleagues repeated their evidence of extraterrestrial
markers in the black mat at the YD boundary, with emphasis on the presence
of nanodiamonds. They suggested several possible impact scenarios,
such as oblique impact on the ice sheet, but admitted that there were
many uncertainties. Several critics reiterated that the proposed impact
is highly unlikely statistically and that an airburst as large as proposed
is inconsistent with our understanding of comets and the impact process.

The
most interesting new results were presented by Jacquelyn Gill, a graduate
student in the Department of Geography at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
She has been studying lake sediments that contain spores of sporomiella
(a fungus that occurs in herbivore dung) in the time range around the
YD. This fungus is related to the total mass of herbivores and can be
used as a proxy for the megafauna population. Her data show a gradual
decline, beginning well before the YD marker and extending beyond
the end of the Younger Dryas cool period. Indeed, in some isolated locations
mammoths and mastodons did not go extinct until much later: there were
dwarf wooly mammoths on Wrangle Island in Alaska until about four
thousand years ago. Some large North American mammals did not go extinct
at all, including the bison, the moose, and the grizzly bear. Gill's
results seem consistent with the worldwide evidence that rapid declines
in large mammal population accompanied the arrival of early human hunters,
presumably as a consequence of overhunting.

Unfortunately,
the overcrowded session ran late, and there was no time for discussion
or questions. Even when their conclusions were challenged, most of the
scientists in the audience chose not to respond. The result was a lost
opportunity for real debate. Perhaps not surprisingly, the AGU session
received very little press attention. Indeed, following the AGU and
GSA meetings, the YD impact hypothesis seems to have retreated into
the obscurity of a few e-mail list-serves and blogs, such as "The
Cosmic Tusk" where George Howard (one of the original PNAS
authors) is presiding over a variety of catastrophist interpretations
of Holocene history.

Conclusions

It is instructive
to compare the trajectories of the YD and KT impact hypotheses, as there
are close parallels. Both research teams were led by nuclear scientists
(Luis Alvarez and Richard Firestone) from the University of California,
Berkeley. Both challenged the orthodoxy of mass extinctions. Both postulated
an environmental catastrophe triggered by a large cosmic impact. Both
were published initially in prestigious journals (Science and PNAS). They each presented a grand synthesis,
not only identifying evidence of extraterrestrial materials at the
extinction boundary but also proposing a broad impact scenario to explain
a wide variety of previously unrelated data. And both ideas were initially
resisted by the "old guard" of paleontologists and archaeologists.

While
each hypothesis encountered initial resistance, the KT impact theory
also gained enthusiastic support (see popular accounts by Walter Alvarez
and James Powell). The first confirming paper was published within weeks,
and soon multiple impact markers had been identified at a number of
additional exposures of the KT boundary. Astronomers and geologists
praised the paper and provided context by estimating the impact rate
for ten-kilometer comets and asteroids. Atmospheric scientists such
as Brian Toon and Kevin Zahnle of NASA Ames Research Center calculated
the dispersion and lifetime of dust ejected into the stratosphere by
the impact. Paleontologists like Peter Ward (University of Washington)—who
initially argued for a gradual decline of populations—gathered new
field data and used modern statistics to support an abrupt extinction
at the KT boundary. Within three years the first of a series of Snowbird
Conferences was held, bringing together top scientists to discuss the
role of cosmic impacts on the evolution of life. The idea of an impact
extinction gained early and continuing currency in the press.

In
contrast, efforts by other scientists to confirm the presence of impact
markers at the YD boundary have so far been unsuccessful. Astronomers,
rather then welcoming the impact idea, have raised serious objections
to the proposal by Firestone and colleagues. New data on megafauna extinction,
such as the work of Gill, point to a gradual decline. Archaeologists
emphasize that changing styles in stone tools do not demonstrate a sudden
shift in human populations at the start of the YD but merely a change
in technology or hunting style. In the aftermath of the 2009 GSA and
AGU meetings, the press seems to have lost interest, and continuing
support for the YD impact comes mostly from blogs by catastrophists
who have long advocated cosmic intervention in human history.

Even
without considering the technical issues at stake, there are two clues
that something is amiss with the YD impact hypothesis. First is the
2006 book The
Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes,
which formulates the YD hypothesis within the context of catastrophist
pseudoscience. If more scientists and science journalists had been aware
of this earlier publication when the YD hypothesis was first published
in PNAS, it might never have gained traction.
Second is the absence of confirming or supporting papers by scientists
who were not members of the original team. A good hypothesis naturally
accretes confirmation and gets better with time, as did the Alvarez
KT impact hypothesis. Firestone's work has not done so.

It
seems clear that the YD impact proponents were trying to follow in the
footsteps of the Alvarez team, discovering evidence of a sudden extinction
event and linking this to an extraterrestrial impact. However, the story
isn't working out that way, and the impact they propose seems to be
virtually impossible. One parallel that troubles me, however, is that
the reaction of the traditionalists—scientists who say that the megafauna
were in decline anyway and "we don't need an impact"—rather
closely echoes the reaction of many old-guard scientists to the KT impact
hypothesis. There also may be philosophical and political overtones
that influence the reception given any proposal that deals with early
human history. There is a long tradition of catastrophist ideas, going
back to the biblical flood and Plato's story of Atlantis. Philosophically,
many people prefer the idea that humans have not had much effect on
the planet, either 13,000 years ago or today—better to blame thunderbolts
from the gods than to accept responsibility for our stewardship of Earth.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful
to Mark Boslough, Clark Chapman, and Alan Harris for many stimulating
discussions of the YD impact hypothesis and especially for their insightful
and generous suggestions for improving this paper.

References

Alvarez,
W. 1997. T. Rex
and the Crater of Doom.
Princeton University Press.

Firestone,
R.B., and W. Topping. 2001. Terrestrial evidence of a nuclear catastrophe
in paleoindian times. Mammoth
Trumpet Magazine (March):
9, published by the Center for the Study of the First Americans.

Firestone,
R., A. West, and S. Warwick-Smith. 2006. The
Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes: Flood, Fire, and Famine in the History
of Civilization. Bear
and Company, Rochester, Vermont.

Firestone,
R.B., et al. 2007. Evidence for an extraterrestrial impact 12,900 years
ago that contributed to the megafaunal extinctions and the Younger Dryas
cooling. Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences
104: 1616.

Geological
Society of America (GSA) Annual Meeting (October 18–21, 2009), Portland,
Oregon. Relevant oral presentations, with quotes from their abstracts.
Paquay et al.: No evidence of extraterrestrial geochemical components
at the Bølling-Allerød/Younger Dryas transition. ("Our study discredits
the YD impact hypothesis.") Surovelle and Holliday: Non-reproducibility
of Younger Dryas extraterrestrial impact results. ("We were unable
to reproduce any results of the original Firestone et al. study and
find no support for Younger Dryas extraterrestrial impact.") Pinter
et al.: Extraterrestrial and terrestrial signatures at the onset of
the Younger Dryas. ("Many of the purportedly unique markers at the
YD boundary layer were found in most or all other sites and horizons
analyzed, often at concentrations much higher than at the YD layer itself.")
Holliday and Meltzer: Geoarchaeology of the 12.9 ka impact hypothesis.
("Sites purported to provide direct evidence of the 12.9 ka impact
are not well constrained to that time. An ET impact is an unnecessary
‘solution' for an archaeological problem that does not exist.")

]]>How to Test a MiracleFri, 06 Aug 2010 12:18:00 EDTinfo@csicop.org ()http://www.csicop.org/si/show/how_to_test_a_miracle
http://www.csicop.org/si/show/how_to_test_a_miracleA few years
ago, my colleague Luigi Garlaschelli and I were asked if we would be
interested in testing a twenty-two-year-old mystic woman who talked
with the Virgin Mary and could create supernatural phenomena.

Debora
Moscogiuri was a mystical seer living in Manduria (Taranto) in southern
Italy. During ecstatic periods, she could supposedly see and receive
messages from the Madonna, which she would then deliver to worshippers.
Other phenomena were said to take place in and around the seer's home,
including religious icons (pictures and statues) allegedly weeping blood.
As is usually the case, none of these phenomena had been carefully investigated
or documented, nor were DNA tests performed to ascertain the origin
of the blood.

In
1995 one of Moscogiuri's statues of the Virgin Mary allegedly began
to drip olive oil. Sealed containers, such as small bottles or jars,
left in the proximity of the statue were later found to be partially
filled with oil. These had been tied with ribbons, taped, sealed with
wax, and placed inside plastic bags. At Moscogiuri's request, some
olive leaves were placed inside the bottles before they were sealed.

This
phenomenon was reproduced when Dr. Giorgio Gagliardi, a physician from
Milan, prepared two such wax-sealed containers: one was kept in his
office and a second identical one was sent to Manduria, which was returned
to him weeks later with some oil in it—still sealed. Nothing had happened
inside the jar kept in Milan. Realizing that wax and tape seals are
inadequate against tampering, Gagliardi asked us about secure, "tamper-evident"
containers.

Evidence of Tampering

When testing
psychic claimants, it is sometimes necessary to allow the subject to
take some target material away from the laboratory in order to try and
obtain a psychic effect on it in his home.
Until a short time ago, the importance of using foolproof containers
when conducting this kind of experiment was not fully recognized. Consider,
for example, the naiveté with which some parapsychologists investigated
the claimed psychokinetic powers of children and teenagers in the past.
Since children and teenagers were thought unlikely (or unable) to cheat,
they were too readily left alone with target material, such as spoons
or pieces of metal to bend. Then, when bends were found in the material,
psychic investigators immediately assumed that some kind of psychic
force was at work. Later
investigations showed these suppositions to be wrong, and now stricter
controls are (or should be) used when testing psychic claims.

Preparing
"fool-proof" containers (e.g., bags, envelopes, or boxes),
which do not allow the subject access to the item contained inside,
has always been a challenge. However, preventing access to the item
(e.g., by placing it in a steel safe) is probably not as important as
making sure that the container is "tamper-evident," meaning it is
prepared in such a way that any improper attempt to open it can be easily
detected. Special security items are now used to this end. The old sealing
wax, for example, has been replaced by self-adhesive labels that show
signs of physical tampering, such as attempts to peel it off or the
application of heat or solvents. These strips also carry unique identification
numbers, used to determine when someone has replaced a strip with a
duplicate after opening the container.

Sealing the Tubes

Returning
to our investigation of Debora Moscogiuri, Luigi and I confirmed with
Gagliardi that the kind of seals he had used could be easily opened
and later replaced. Therefore, we prepared a set of sealed test tubes
as follows: a) an olive
leaf was put into each glass test tube; b) the tubes were flame-sealed
on a Bunsen burner, taking care not to scorch the leaf inside; c) each
tube was numbered in several positions using a vibrating glass-etching
instrument; d) each tube was checked for invisible gaps by holding it
under water (in such conditions small air bubbles would escape from
those imperfectly sealed); e) the tubes were weighed on a precision
lab balance (tared just prior to this operation), recording all digits
within a milligram of precision; f) each tube was then photographed
with additional close-up lenses to record the etched number and shape
of the sealed tip, where the glass had been melted.

When
these tubes were slightly heated, the leaf inside gave off a few tiny
droplets of water. The general look was quite different from that of
oil, the total weight of course did not change, and the droplets were
re-absorbed after a few days. Thus we decided not to worry about this
detail. Each tube could then be identified by its weight and photograph,
and each was "tamper-evident," as there is no way that glass can
be melted and resealed exactly in its original shape.

Eight
of these vials (numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 10) were delivered to
Moscogiuri through Gagliardi and Father Civerra, a Catholic priest
who followed the seer. We did not know the whereabouts of the sealed
tubes, nor what was happening to them at the other end of Italy.

Surprise, Surprise!

Two notable
events followed. We received news from Civerra, wherein he reported
a mystical vision by Moscogiuri of the Blessed Virgin: she had seen
a large tongue of flame (of the Holy Ghost) approach the tubes and take
one of them away, leaving just seven (the number of the Virgin's sorrows).
Later, there was speculation that some of our tubes contained oil.

Through
the intermediacy of Gagliardi and Civerra, we managed to get our tubes
back. We then examined them during a videotaped meeting attended by
both Gagliardi and Civerra. Afterward, all participants signed a statement
of the results. Civerra had put the tubes we had prepared into a jar
and then into a plastic bag; each of these containers had been wax-sealed.
For the reasons given above, we disregarded these extra security measures
and requested that only our tubes be taken out and checked. It should
be noted that when asked, Civerra admitted that he had no way of verifying
whether his wax seals had been tampered with and replaced.

It
turned out that: a) one of the eight tubes (number 3) was missing; b)
tubes 1, 2, and 7 were intact and did not contain any liquid; c) tube
4 had a broken tip that had produced a small gap, but no liquid was
present; and d) tubes 6, 8, and 10 contained a yellow viscous liquid.

A
comparison with the photographs of the originals showed that the tips
had been melted and resealed. The shapes of the tips were clearly different.
One of the tubes had been tampered with on the side, and the glass was
deformed, leaving a large bubble. One tip was also slightly cracked.
All three of these phials contained traces of a black substance, and
the leaf was partially or completely carbonized.

It
was quite apparent that some crude tampering had occurred, which was
indicative not of a miracle but, on the contrary, of some sort of fraud
carried out by somebody in Moscogiuri's group. However, Civerra did
not accept our suggestion of fraud, claiming that he placed more trust
in his own external wax seals and that any deformity in the tubes was
due to the "Holy Ghost's flame" in Moscogiuri's vision.

Despite
Civerra's claim, we concluded that such flame-sealed glass test tubes—prepared
with the few simple control procedures described above—could actually
be a useful tool in the hands of researchers testing psychokinetic abilities.

As
for Debora Moscogiuri, it appears that she still claims to have visions
and periodically receive messages from the Virgin Mary, but strangely
enough, materializations of oil inside containers no longer take place. l

Acknowledgment

This study
would not have been possible without the work of Luigi Garlaschelli.

Carrying
a Power Balance card in your pocket will supposedly improve your athletic
performance and cure what ails you. The alleged mechanism ("frequencies" in
an embedded hologram) is laughable pseudoscientific bunk.

Remember
when professional golfers were wearing Q-ray bracelets to improve their game? The Q-ray folks recently had
a run-in with the courts. They admitted their product was only a placebo
but argued that it was acceptable to lie to elicit the placebo response.
The judge disagreed: they were convicted of fraud, forced to pay back
$16 million, and required to remove the deceptive claims from their
advertising. Now they have a new competitor: Power Balance Performance
Technology. Like the Q-ray bracelet, it is based on "resonance." It doesn't even have
to come in contact with your body: one version is a card that you simply
put in your pocket.

Power Balance representatives
demonstrate their products

in sports
stores at malls. They test your strength and balance and then give you
a Power Balance card to hold or put in your pocket. When they retest
you, you miraculously do better. There are some revealing videos on
YouTube, including a short clip that shows the subject standing on one
foot with arms outstretched. The
salesman pushes down on the subject's arm near the wrist, and the
subject starts to fall over. After the subject puts a Power Balance
card in his pocket, the salesman repeats the test but this time pushes
down near the elbow, creating a shorter lever arm that of course reduces
the effect of the force applied, so the subject doesn't fall over.
In other demonstrations, they use other simple biomechanical tricks
like this to create false impressions of improved strength. The amount
of force applied is subjective, both parties know when the card is in
use, and they know what is expected to happen—it's a recipe for
self-deception.

What's
in these magic cards? I will quote at length from their Web site for
the entertainment value:

POWER BALANCE
Performance Technology has been embedded with naturally occurring
frequencies found in nature that have been known to react positively
with the body's energy field. This helps to promote balance, flexibility,
strength and overall wellness.

For thousands
of years, eastern medicine has been using the same techniques for personal
wellness through finding things in nature that react positively with
your body, such as rocks, minerals, crystals, etc. Through kinesiology
we have learned that certain foods cause the body to react either positively
or negatively as well. Although not all substances found in nature work
the same on everyone, we have narrowed it down to a few that we believe
are highly beneficial and have put them together to create Power Balance
Performance Technology.

It's hard
to argue with nature and the fact is that everything in nature resonates
at a particular frequency. That is what keeps it all together. We react
with frequency because we are a frequency. Most simply, we are a bunch
of cells held together by frequency. If you hold processed sugar or
a cell phone in your hand and hold your arm straight out to your side
and have someone push your arm down while you resist, it goes down pretty
easily because processed sugar and cellular telephones do not react
positively with the human body. Basically, the frequencies in sugar
and cell phones create a reaction that makes your body weaker. Adversely,
if you put certain vitamins or minerals in your hand and do the same
test with your arm, you will find it is much harder for that person
to push your arm down. Your body's energy field likes things that
are good for it and craves to be around those things. At Power Balance,
we have taken a few of those items and through advances in technology,
have been able to duplicate those positive energies and imprint them
onto our holographic media.

Why Holograms?
We use holograms because they are composed of Mylar—a polyester film
used for imprinting music, movies, pictures, and other data. Thus, it
was a natural fit. In fact, the hologram is so complex with such infinite
depth and minimal surface area, that many companies are now using them
as hard drives. Along those same lines, we felt that it would be a lot
easier to get someone to put a hologram in there [sic] shoe rather then [sic]
a Power Balance equipped rock or apple.

Power
Balance products include a ten-pack of stick-on embedded holograms ($59.95),
a pendant ($39.95), a wristband ($29.95), and an eight-pack of pocket
cards ($59.95).

The
company targets athletes, particularly surfers. According to numerous
testimonials, Power Balance seems to improve performance. One surfer
claims he can even sense the presence of the card: "I can feel it
on me." Another testimonial is from Tommy Grunt, United States
Marine Corps. Maybe Grunt is real, but ads for quack products have been
known to feature fabricated testimonials, and I can easily imagine a
copywriter putting tongue in cheek and creating a name like that to
relieve the boredom. There are reports of the products' effectiveness
in animals, from horses to birds. The products allegedly relieve headaches,
menstrual pain, and all kinds of other symptoms. The testimonials give
the impression that if you feel unwell in any way, the magic card will
restore you to normal. If you already feel well, it will make you better
than normal.

"A
primitive form of this technology was discovered when someone, somewhere
along the line, picked up a rock and felt something that reacted positively
with his body." I don't doubt that someone believed he felt something,
but I seriously doubt it was due to the frequency of the rock resonating
with the frequency of his body.

For
resonance to occur, something has to vibrate. You may be able to make
a rock resonate, but the rock doesn't create its own vibrations. Crystalline
structures can be made to vibrate. The tympanic membrane and the vocal
cords vibrate, but the whole body doesn't. When a soprano wants to
break a glass with her voice, she can first listen to the sound made
by tapping it with a spoon; if she can match that sound frequency, the
glass will resonate and possibly shatter. How can you tap a cat to see
what its frequency is? Can you imagine a soprano shattering a cat?

This
whole resonance and vibration business is pseudoscience emanating from
the myth of the human energy field—not the kind of energy physicists
measure but some vague life energy like the acupuncturists' qi,
the chiropractors' Innate, and the imaginary fields that Therapeutic
Touch practitioners claim they are smoothing down with their hands.
"We are a frequency" and "We are a bunch of cells held together
by frequency" and "Your body's energy field likes things that
are good for it" are statements so incoherent, so much at odds with
scientific knowledge, that they "aren't even wrong."

The
definition of frequency is "the number of repetitions
of a periodic process in a unit of time." A frequency can't exist
in isolation. There has to be a periodic process, like a sound wave,
a radio wave, a clock pendulum, or a train passing by at the rate of x
boxcars per minute. The phrase "33 1/3 per minute" is meaningless:
you can't have an rpm without an r. A periodic process can have a
frequency, but an armadillo and a tomato can't. Neither a periodic
process nor a person can "be" a frequency.

Pushing
down on the arm is a bogus muscle testing technique known as applied
kinesiology. It is supposedly used to diagnose allergies: if you hold
a sealed vial of an allergen, your strength supposedly diminishes. It
only works if the doctor and patient know what substance is being tested;
when double-blind controls have been used, kinesiology has failed every
test.

Omitting
for a moment the crucial question "Frequencies of what?" how
did the Power Balance creators determine which frequencies to use? "We
have narrowed it down to a few that we believe are highly beneficial."
Okay ... how exactly did they measure the frequencies, and what criteria
did they use to narrow them down? I think the wording of the ad is revealing:
the company says they "believe" they are highly beneficial, not
that they have any evidence that they are—assuming there really
are any frequencies and that they have somehow put them in a hologram.
I e-mailed the company and asked simple questions like "How do you
measure the frequency of a rock?" They didn't answer.

In
online discussions, one man "tested" the product by having one hundred
athletes try it, with no controls of any kind; not surprisingly, all
of the athletes reported improvement. A man watching a demonstration
suggested a real test, blinding the subject as to whether the card was
present, but (not surprisingly) the salesman wouldn't cooperate.

This
would be so simple to test properly. Take five Power Balance cards and
five credit cards, put them in opaque envelopes, shuffle, number the
envelopes 1 through 10, have a third party slip an envelope in the subject's
pocket, and then challenge the salesman to tell which envelopes had
the real card. I could not find evidence that they have ever done such
a test, presumably because they know it would fail.

These
products may actually do some good. Modern versions of an amulet or
rabbit's foot (without harm to rabbits), they elicit a placebo response,
giving people confidence and possibly making them try harder. They are
not exorbitantly expensive and even come with a money-back guarantee.

The
marketing is pure genius. If I were a professional scam artist, I don't
think I could come up with anything better. The company has an impressive
trick demonstration that easily fools most people. They spout a lot
of pseudoscientific hooey that sounds impressive to the scientifically
illiterate, but they are careful to make only vague claims that the
Federal Trade Commission can't object to. The harmless products are
inexpensive to manufacture, but the company charges enough to afford
a money-back guarantee and still make money. They package the cheaper
cards and stickers in multiples so they can charge more, but the prices
are still low enough that the average person is willing to take a chance.
Who knows what is actually in the products? If it were my scam, I'd
put in any old hologram or none at all. No one is likely to investigate
your production line to see how you get all those "beneficial frequencies"
into the Mylar.

Tell
me you use the Power Balance card and it makes you feel better, and
I can readily believe you. Tell me your performance improves when you
carry it, and I will believe you. But that won't convince me that
the improvement has anything to do with bioresonating frequencies in
the holograms—or even with the cards themselves.

It's
like the tooth fairy. Tell me money appears under your pillow, and I
will believe you. But that won't convince me that the tooth fairy
did it.

The
tooth fairy phenomenon is easily explained by human psychology and parental
behavior. The Power Balance phenomenon is easily explained by suggestion,
confirmation bias, the placebo response, and other well-known aspects
of human psychology that conspire to persuade people that ineffective
things work.

Before
writing this article, I discussed with CSI Research Fellow Benjamin
Radford whether the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry might want to do
a simple double-blind test. We decided not to because it is just too
silly to bother with. As Radford put it, "This sort of scientific
testing should be done by the company; it is not the skeptics' job
to spend time and money testing outlandish claims for which no reliable
evidence has been offered."

We're
not going to bother setting up a video camera to catch the tooth fairy
either.

The evidence provided by Stan Romanek that purports to prove he has been repeatedly visited or contacted by extraterrestrials is all of a suspicious nature.

I was queried
by ABC News about an alien video that subsequently aired on the ABC
show Primetime:
The Outsiders (August
18, 2009). The documentary focused on the personal experiences of a
few people who believe they have been abducted by aliens, as well as
on certain physical evidence, offered by one alleged abductee, that
purports to prove alien visitation.

The
reported experiences were consistent with other abductees' reports.
Many of the abductees have simply had common "waking dreams,"
which occur in the borderland between wakefulness and sleep. Others
have been hypnotized by alien-abduction gurus like the late Dr. John
Mack and therefore have merely gone on a trip to Fantasyland that can
conjure up false memories. Some of the more elaborate experiences happened
to subjects (like Whitley Strieber, author of Communion) who, though sane and normal, nevertheless
exhibit many of the traits of fantasy-prone personalities: being easily
hypnotized, having vivid memories, experiencing intense dreams, and
having out-of-body experiences, among others (Nickell 2007, 251–258;
Baker 1987–88). A few alleged abductees may be psychotic, while others
seem so craving of attention that they have turned to hoaxing.

The
physical evidence was offered by Stan Romanek, forty-six, who claims
to have had contact with extraterrestrials since 2000. Indeed, if he
is to be believed, he serves as a virtual magnet for extraterrestrial
attention and has been getting quite a bit of terrestrial notice too—not
all of it favorable. Living on disability income, he spends much time
actively promoting the notion that aliens are fascinated by him. His
obsession began when he caught on video a UFO that was witnessed by
others at a park on the outskirts of Denver. Romanek also offers a video
of an alien peering in his window and an X-ray showing an alien "implant"
in his leg.

On Primetime: The Outsiders he was supposedly hypnotized by
Leo Sprinkle, a psychologist who studies abductees and contactees.
(Formerly of the University of Wisconsin, Sprinkle was asked to leave
his position when colleagues found his work unprofessional and unscientific
[Chang and Dubreuil 2009].) Under hypnosis, Romanek, who claims to have
only a fifth-grade proficiency in math, wrote out a high-order mathematical
sequence known as Drake's equation (an astrophysics formula approximating
the number of planets in the Milky Way galaxy that could have intelligent
life) (Chang and Dubreuil 2009).

To
a professional mathematician, the equation feat seemed no more than
memorization by an amateur. When ABC News asked Romanek for an independent
medical assessment of his alleged implant, he claimed it had suddenly
disappeared (Chang and Dubreuil 2009).1 As for the videotaped alien,
which Romanek named "Boo," a reporter appropriately described
it as resembling "one of the glow-in-the-dark heads I got when I was
in Roswell, New Mexico" (Meadow 2009). It certainly embodies the stereotypical
likeness—the big-eyed, big-headed little humanoid that has evolved
in popular culture and is seen in toy stores (Nickell 2001, 160–163).
Romanek's alien provoked many parodies on the Internet.

Romanek's
wife seems extraordinarily credulous, though she insists she is not.
It is difficult to keep a straight face when you hear her say: "... when all your [TV] remotes in your house disappear for three days
and you have searched everywhere, and then you wake up the next morning
and they're all lined up on the counter, that's something I can't
explain when I've searched for them." Less naive people would surely
look not to aliens but to nearby terrestrial beings for suspects.

To
assess Romanek's UFO video, I turned to my colleague Tom Flynn, a
video expert, who treated me to a frame-by-frame analysis. He noted
that the object was below clouds and appeared to pick up "illumination
from ground sources such as street lights," suggesting it was
rather low-flying and small, which was further suggested by its apparent
rate of motion relative to the camera. As Flynn explained:

A very large
object would have to move at a very high rate of speed to display the
apparent motion seen in this clip. A smaller object, which would be
correspondingly closer to the camera, could display the same apparent
rate of motion if it were simply drifting on a modest breeze, particularly
if it had been quite close to the camera at the beginning of the shot.

Flynn concluded:

Given the
modest amount of visual evidence, many other explanations are possible.
But in my opinion the imagery of this just over 11-second clip is consistent
with a translucent, slightly underinflated balloon between 2' and
6' in diameter that carries or contains two light sources: one circular
whitish constant light source, and one flashing red strobe with a period
of 8–10 flashes per second, released from a position to the left of
camera prior to the shot and allowed to drift overhead on a wind blowing
from the videographer's left.

He characterized
the red flashing light as "similar to emergency strobes found on some
toys, camping lanterns, and the like" (Flynn 2009; see figures
1–3).

In
short, the evidence provided by Stan Romanek that purports to prove
he has been repeatedly visited or contacted by extraterrestrials is
all of a doubtful, even suspicious, nature. I cannot distinguish it
from hoaxing. Romanek, who is reportedly working on a feature film,
asks of the entities, "Are they from a different planet? I can't
tell you. I know they're not human, whatever they are" (qtd. in
Chang and Dubreuil 2009). The evidence would appear to indicate that
they, and their craft, hail from the familiar planet Latex. l

Acknowledgments

I am grateful
to CFI colleagues Henry Huber, Tom Flynn, and Tim Binga for their help
with this investigation.

Interview with Scott Crocker

Strangely enough,
the ivory-bill has captured the imagination of people the world over
for a very long time.

The chance
sighting in Arkansas's Cache River National Wildlife Refuge of a presumed
extinct woodpecker led to a 2005 scientific expedition that confirmed
that the birds still live. The ivory-billed woodpecker (Campephilus principalis), last known to exist in 1944,
was supposedly sighted in eastern Arkansas in 2004. A blurry video clip
showed the bird's distinctive size and markings. "The bird captured
on video is clearly an ivory-billed woodpecker. Amazingly, America may
have another chance to protect the future of this spectacular bird and
the awesome forests in which it lives," said John Fitzpatrick, director
of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology.

The
discovery of the bird spawned international headlines and an article
in the journal Science (see "Rare Woodpecker, Presumed
Extinct, Found in Arkansas," SI, March/April 2006). The rediscovery
was also trumpeted by believers in Bigfoot and lake monsters as proof
that animals thought long extinct may still exist.

Yet
after five years of searching (at a cost of over $10 million) the ivory-billed
woodpecker's existence remains unproven. Not a single bird has been
found. A discovery once touted worldwide as a hopeful environmental
miracle has turned into a complex and fascinating tale of environmentalism,
anecdotal evidence, and scientific debate. What happened is the subject
of a new documentary film titled Ghost
Bird. I interviewed
the film's director, Scott Crocker.

Benjamin Radford Why was the story of the
rediscovery of an obscure woodpecker such a big deal?

Scott Crocker Strangely enough,
the ivory-bill has captured the imagination of people the world over
for a very long time. They were truly striking black and white woodpeckers,
the males having bright red crests, and they were once the largest woodpeckers in North America. Full grown they were two
feet tall and had a wingspan of nearly three feet.

The
alleged rediscovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker in 2005 made headlines
around the world. That a species of this magnitude had returned from
the dead after being presumed extinct for over half a century was both
miraculous and astonishing. A kayaker's sighting was confirmed by a
search team from Cornell University's Laboratory of Ornithology, one
of the world's leading institutions devoted to studying all things
avian. Their rediscovery in Arkansas was perceived as a kind of environmental
miracle suggesting that mankind was getting a second chance to save
a species he had singlehandedly exterminated. And just maybe, the efforts
of conservationists were beginning to turn the tide of human-caused
extinctions.

Radford The
tiny town of Brinkley, Arkansas, was the epicenter of the furor over
the ivory-bill. What effect did all this international publicity have
on the town?

Crocker Brinkley played a central role
in both receiving and reinforcing the rediscovery hype, partly because
they had nothing to lose.

Radford Many
towns that have a local "monster" are quick to capitalize on their
local mystery (for example, Bluff Creek, California, has a booming Bigfoot-related
business, and Inverness, Scotland, earns a lot of money from Nessie
tourism). Brinkley, quite understandably, did the same thing.

Crocker They tried. While some locals were
quick to capitalize on the publicity by selling ivory-bill burgers,
haircuts, and T-shirts, the influx of birders and their fat wallets
never quite materialized. The world's only ivory-billed woodpecker
gift shop has closed, and there was only one Annual Ivory-bill Celebration
in Brinkley's new convention center.

Radford How
did you get involved in making Ghost
Bird?

Crocker I heard about the ivory-bill's
rediscovery like everyone else, when then-Secretary of the Interior
Gale Norton announced it had been seen in Arkansas. And as fascinating
as the rediscovery was, I was equally intrigued by the descriptions
of the yearlong top-secret search and the many hours birders spent deep
in the snake- and mosquito-infested cypress swamps of Arkansas waiting
for a glimpse of the largest and rarest woodpecker in North America. It
sounded like a Samuel Becket play, Waiting
for a Woodpecker.

I
didn't get personally pulled into the story until the following September.
I was attending the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival where I met
a cameraman who had practically lived in those swamps waiting for the
ultimate money shot. Fourteen months later he emerged with a couple brief
sightings and a few compelling bird sounds only to discover his second
wife had left him. I thought, wow, these people are seriously obsessed. I
needed to find out why. While I didn't go into it as a skeptic, I
also didn't unquestioningly accept everything the search team announced
or claimed about their very blurry video of something flying through
the swamp.

Radford One person in your film described
the debate as about "hope versus skepticism."

Crocker That was [bird expert] David Sibley's
distillation of the whole issue, and I think he hit the nail on the
head. The sightings by top ornithologists, their scientific documentation,
and the controlled media campaign announcing the ivory-bill's rediscovery
created an atmosphere that was not unlike G.W. Bush's doctrine of "Either
you are with us or you are against us."

Radford That doesn't sound like
open, scientific debate.

Crocker Well, some of that exclusiveness
came down to the good intentions of protecting the species from being
"loved to death" by birders. However, it was also driven by the
need to raise money and acquire local land inexpensively. Questioning
the evidence was a threat to the $10 million in federal, state, and
private money the search team raised. Questioning the sightings also
meant questioning the integrity of the ornithologists and birders who
made those sightings—and the birding community heavily relies on individual
integrity. Since the search scientists didn't invite any real critique
of their findings, in the end you were either on board and hopeful,
or you were a skeptical outsider. And no one wanted this iconic bird's
rediscovery not to be true.

Radford Political grandstanding and
bird expert squabbles aside, the ivory-bill's rediscovery was given
scientific credibility by a high-profile cover article in Science,
right?

Crocker Absolutely. The Science article in many ways is the lynchpin
to all of this. Without that article and the magazine's enormous clout,
I don't think the rediscovery would have had much traction. That their
editorial staff seemingly looked the other way and gave the ornithologists
the benefit of the doubt raises some of the more interesting questions
about the whole rediscovery fiasco. How much of this had to do with
selling magazine issues? How much had to do with everyone hitching a
ride on a career-making moment?

Radford What does the story of the
woodpecker say about how science works?

Crocker I think the most disturbing message
of the rediscovery is the central role money plays in driving scientific
inquiry and research. One academic who has been tracking this trend
described to me the process of acquiring funding for research as being
akin to throwing spaghetti at the wall: whatever project sticks gets
the green light. This "stickiness factor" of proposals is often
determined by very unscientific agendas having more to do with commercial
and public relation interests.

Radford How did the search for the
ivory-bill become so politicized, with agendas and egos?

Crocker Territorial squabbles are of course
nothing new to academics. And there was a healthy amount of slinging
from both sides in the ivory-bill debate. However, the real anger surrounded
the redirection of scarce funding from existing endangered species recovery
programs to the search for a ghost bird. It's one thing to run around
in the swamp seeing things. It's another thing entirely to do that
with money "rediscovered" in the research accounts of other scientists.
This brings us back to the legacy of the Bush administration: they promised
$10 million in funding for the search but then robbed Peter to pay Paul;
it wasn't new funding.

Radford What's been the response
to your film? Is there any current funding for the search, or is it
effectively dead?

Crocker Cornell continues to maintain that
they saw an ivory-bill and documented it on video. They admit that the
bird has not been quite as "persistent" as they had hoped. As of
this year they are no longer actively searching for the bird in Arkansas,
though they were one of two groups looking in Florida last year.

Radford Does it matter if the ivory-billed
woodpecker exists or not?

Crocker If there's only one of them,
no, not really. I think what matters is that we collectively come to
grips with taking responsibility for the species mankind is causing
to go extinct. Ultimately, perhaps the most lasting significance of
the ivory-bill is how it has become a mirror that reflects back to us
our difficult relationship to the natural world and our uncertain place
in it. We can look deeper into that mirror and change how we inhabit
the planet, or we can look away and go about our business as usual.

Ghost
Bird opened in New York
City at the end of March for a week at Anthology Film Archives. The
DVD should be available in June; find more details at www.GhostBirdMovie.com.

Benjamin
Radford is managing editor of the Skeptical Inquirer and an avid fan
of documentary films.

]]>The War of the WeaselsThu, 15 Apr 2010 07:33:00 EDTinfo@csicop.org ()http://www.csicop.org/si/show/the_war_of_the_weasels
http://www.csicop.org/si/show/the_war_of_the_weaselsOr “How an Intelligent Design Theorist was Bested in a Public Math Competition by a Genetic Algorithm!”

This Online Extra is a follow-up to the article “War of the Weasels” from the May/June 2010 issue of the Skeptical Inquirer (Volume 34.3, May/June 2010). The print article discusses the use of a genetic algorithm (GA) to solve tricky math problems and demonstrates that no specific “target” is required for such algorithms, contra the interminable creationist attacks on the “Weasel” simulation discussed in Richard Dawkins's book The Blind Watchmaker. The problem I developed the GA for is called Steiner's Problem; it involves finding the shortest straight-line-segment networks connecting an array of given fixed points. This problem provides a miniature digital playground on the very edge of complexity.

I first became interested in Steiner networks because of their connection to minimal surfaces and to physical analogs like soap films. These are useful in some minimization problems because surface tension in the soap films acts to minimize the total area of film. This property allows Steiner network problems to be solved directly with soap films. First, two parallel clear plates are connected by posts that represent the nodes or “cities” of the problem. Then, the assembly is dipped into a solution of soapy water and then carefully withdrawn to produce the Steiner solution (one hopes).

Here is a soap-film realization of the five-node system. Seven segments are joined with three variable nodes to make the compact network shown—the proper Steiner solution for the five-node system. Again, the segments meet at 120-degree angles.

It wasn’t until I started investigating whether some of the MacGyver solutions could also be realized with soap films that things really got interesting. I quickly found that several of the configurations that evolved from the genetic algorithm could also be obtained with soap films, simply by pulling the parallel plates out of the soap solution at angles other than horizontal. A soap film incarnation of one of the MacGyver shapes appears below.

Not all of the MacGyvers could be obtained with soap films, however. The shape below, which I named the “Face Plant,” features four segments meeting at a common point. While this presents no problem for DNA representations of solutions, it is almost impossible in real soap films, as the junction of four films is invariably a very unstable equilibrium. In soap films, such junctions of four segments will quickly resolve into a bow-tie shape as typified in the solution to a simple four-node Steiner system. The Face Plant turned out to be a MacGyver solution that could easily exist in the genetic algorithm but could not be realized with minimal-surface soap films.

As if that wasn’t strange enough, I soon stumbled on the “Doggie”—a stable soap film configuration that never appeared during the genetic algorithms simulations. Even the formal (but topologically tricky) Steiner solution popped out one of two hundred runs on average—why did the Doggie never appear?

Figure 5. The “Doggie”: A viable soap film solution for a five-node system.

After several frustrated attempts at Doggie evolution, I decided to go ahead and do what Dembski implies I am doing for all such shapes—deliberately perform some “genetic engineering” to “front-load” the system with a specified solution. Accordingly, I deduced the DNA configuration for a typical Doggie and forced this particular organism to be present as one individual of the very first generation of a simulation.

“the Doggie” length = 1403

Figure 6. The “Doggie”: a nonviable genetic algorithm solution for a five-node system.

Sure enough, the Doggie was much more fit than most members of the initial (random) population and persisted for several generations. However, at 150 to 200 units longer than all of the MacGyver solutions, it was quickly out-competed and forced to extinction by such fitter solutions. After a dozen generations or so, the Doggie was simply wiped out by the competition.

Had I actually been feeding the proper Steiner solution into the algorithm—“front-loading” in Dembski’s parlance—it would have always triumphed, and I would never have found the bizarre and wonderful world of MacGyver also-rans. The same boring result would also have been obtained had I defined “fitness” as deviation from a single, specific “target”—the proper Steiner solution itself. Either way, I wouldn’t have found that some (but not all) of these new structures could be realized with soap films, and I wouldn’t have found that some stable soap film configurations are far longer than the minimum possible and are not retained in evolutionary algorithms. As I said, I have never been as astonished at the unexpected output of one of my digital programs.

As the ID community flailed about trying to answer the Design Challenge, reader Sam Garret commented, “Can’t they just figure it out with soap bubbles? Assuming they can remember the way to the lab, of course.” Alas, such was not the case.

]]>Review of “Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be” by Daniel LoxtonFri, 09 Apr 2010 11:54:00 EDTinfo@csicop.org ()http://www.csicop.org/si/show/review_of_evolution_how_we_and_all_living_things_came_to_be
http://www.csicop.org/si/show/review_of_evolution_how_we_and_all_living_things_came_to_beTwo very different books about evolution crossed my desk recently. The first, by Richard Dawkins, is titled The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (Free Press). The second, by Daniel Loxton, is Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be (Kids Can Press).

The fact that either of these authors felt the need to write their respective books is, in a way, somewhat bizarre and sad. Charles Darwin published his book On the Origin of Species in 1859; the world has had 150 years to digest and understand evolution, and evidence for Darwin’s theory has grown more robust with each passing year. In an ideal world, Dawkins and Loxton would be chided for wasting their time and effort pointing out the patently self-evident. What’s next, a book explaining to the public that the sun shines upon them every day?

And yet polls and surveys show that a significant number of people (around 40 percent, but depending on the exact poll question) have doubts about evolution. Some of them are creationists, but many others simply have never had evolution explained to them correctly.

Evolution by natural selection is not necessarily clear or intuitive. Evolution is not inherently obvious; it is a slow, complex process with many nuances. Whether stunted by a poor educational system or religious fundamentalists, it is a minor tragedy that one of the greatest scientific ideas in history remains the subject of dispute.

That is why books like The Greatest Show on Earth and Evolution are important. The former is meant for educated adults who want complete, well-rounded information on the evidence for evolution; the latter is aimed at children and teens who want a solid understanding of evolution’s fundamentals. Each is very appropriate for its audience, and paired together both books make a complete evolution literacy package (along with On the Origin of Species, which remains very readable). To be honest, I’ve not had a chance to more than skim Dawkins’s 460-page tome, though I expect it’s excellent. Loxton’s book, with only fifty-five pages and enticing full-color art on every page, is more accessible, and I’ll focus on that.

Loxton has a lot of ground to cover, and he begins by noting that different fossils are found in different geological strata—a fact that suggested to early researchers that many now-extinct animals had once roamed the planet (and much longer ago than most people could imagine). Evolution goes on to touch on a wide variety of subjects related to evolution, from DNA to the alleged “living dinosaur” mokele-mbembe. Along the way, new concepts such as species and mutation are introduced, often in the form of posed questions. Charles Darwin’s experiments are briefly described, including his research into avian inbreeding and the variations in beaks in isolated populations of Galapagos island finches. The elements of evolution are explained in terms that are neither dumbed-down nor too complex for its target audience.

Loxton, editor of Junior Skeptic, also shows off his considerable illustration skills. The book is clearly written for children, and eye-catching graphics are of course a necessity. Every page has one or more enticing, full-color images illustrating everything from dinosaurs to the bird-dinosaur Archaeopteryx to cute, flirty little zebra-like things called Zooks. This helps reinforce the important concept that evolution is not a stale, dry theory dusted off from irrelevant history or science books but instead a real, active process occurring all around us at this very moment. It’s rare to find such an accessible, dynamic treatment of the subject of evolution.

Evolution also wisely anticipates and addresses some of the most common anti-evolution fallacies (such as that the eye is too complex to have evolved naturally). This feature alone makes the book better than other simplified descriptions of evolution because it inoculates readers against bogus creationist arguments they may hear but would be otherwise unable to answer.

While the content of the book is very good, a few elements could have used better organization. For example, there are about a dozen sections that begin with a question. This is a useful way to present information, but the questions appear next to illustrated oval portraits of people whose relevance to the book is unclear. The questions themselves are fine, but I found the associations with anonymous portraits confusing at first. It might have been more effective if the book had begun with two or three recurring characters who would be asking questions on behalf of the reader throughout the book, instead of introducing a different, apparently random face each time. The book also needed a references or further reading section. Though Richard Dawkins is quoted several times in the text, for example, none of his books or articles are mentioned or referenced. Overall, however, these minor issues don’t detract from the book’s presentation and message.

I hope that 150 years from now books on evolution, such as those by Dawkins and Loxton, will be considered obsolete, a redundant parroting of basic facts that every schoolchild knows.

Until then, the world is sorely in need of high-quality, accessible science and skeptical books for teens and children, and Loxton’s book is an excellent and long-overdue introduction to evolution.